not to see.  Legislation is an attempt to express public sentiment in statutory form; but public sentiment must precede legislation if it is to become effective.  Efforts have been made through the process of legislation to deny the granting of marriage licenses to people who are physically unsound, but the efforts came to naught because public sentiment has not attained to this plane of thinking.  Hence, we shall not have much help from legislation in solving our problem, until public sentiment has been educated.

=The responsibility of the school.=—­This education must come, in large part, through the schools, but even these will fail until they come into a full realization of the fact that their field of effort is life in the large.  Time was when the teacher thought she was employed to teach geography, grammar, and arithmetic.  Then she enlarged this to include boys and girls.  And now she needs to make another addition and realize that her function is to teach boys and girls the subject of Life, using the branches of study as a means to this end.  In a report on the work of the schools at Gary, Indiana, the statement is made that the first purpose of these schools seems to be to produce efficient workers for the mills.  This seems to savor of the doctrine of educational foreordination, and would make millwork and life synonymous.  Life is larger than any mill.  We may be justified in educating one horse for the plow and another for the race track, but this justification rests upon the fact that horses are assets and not liabilities.

=Clean living.=—­Clean living in this generation will, undeniably, project itself into the next, and we have only to see to it that all the activities of the school function in clean living in the child of to-day, and we shall surely be safeguarding the interests of the child of the future.  But clean living means more than mere externals.  The daily bath, pure food, fresh air, and sanitary conditions are essential but not sufficient in themselves.  Clean thinking, right motives, and a high respect for the rights and interests of the future must enter into the scheme of life.  There must be no devious ways, no back alleys, in the scheme, but only the broad highway of life, open always to the sunlight and to the gaze of all mankind.  All this must become thoroughly enmeshed in the social consciousness and in the daily practice of every individual, before the school can lay claim to success in the art of teaching efficient living.

QUESTIONS AND EXERCISES

1.  Investigate the following agencies as means for providing future generations with ancestors of untainted blood:  legislation; moral education; physical education; sex hygiene and eugenics; penal institutions; medical science.

2.  Enumerate some of the physical and mental handicaps of the child who is not well born.

3.  What powerful appeal for clean living may be made to the adolescent youth?